The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset isn’t even out yet, but developer Mindfield Games didn’t want to wait to get started on a game for the platform.
Mindfield is announcing today that it will show off its first-person exploration game Pollen at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco at the beginning of March. Set on Titan — the largest moon of Saturn — Pollen gives players a mysterious world to discover. It begins in a research station where you must investigate what happened to the previous crew. Mindfield says the station is fully interactive, and it promises that as you progress through this virtual-reality world you will uncover more secrets about what is really going on.
In a statement, Mindfield Games founder Olli Sinerma refers to Pollen as a “space-exploration and mystery game.” That concept is something that meshes well with the state of virtual-reality hardware. The Oculus Rift enables players to look around and feel a presence in a 3D simulation, and Sinerma and his team are focused on a gameplay core that is built around that strength.
Like a number of other early virtual reality developers, Mindfield is using the Unity game-creation toolkit. This is the third-party software that a large number of smaller studios use to build 3D and 2D games for PC, consoles, and mobile. While you can easily find dozens of games using Unity on Oculus Rift, Unity — the company — obviously felt this game was worth highlighting since it will showcase Pollen in its booth at GDC.
Mindfield isn’t just planning to show Pollen to the press. The developer will immediately jump from San Francisco for GDC to Boston for the Penny Arcade Expo East on March 6 through March 8. At that event, which is open to fans, Mindfield will show off its project to the public.
If you’re wondering when Mindfield might release Pollen, that it is still likely a ways off. Oculus VR, a subsidiary of Facebook, is still working on the final consumer version of the Rift. That is expected to debut this year, and Mindfield will likely wait until that hardware ships to retailers before trying to release Pollen only to people who have Oculus’s developer kits.